Ed Barnhart
Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 25 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Civilization is triggered by humans learning to stay in one place, not by anything they invented there.
For the vast majority of human existence, we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic region, but they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Atlantis never existed; it was one of Plato's teaching parables, and Akrotiri is the nearest real thing to it.
I don’t think that Atlantis existed. I do think it was one of Plato’s many parables talking about putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
The first people reached the Americas at least 30,000 years ago, not 12,500.
We see the traditional 12,500 years ago that there was a migration, but now we’re seeing one that’s almost certainly happening closer to 30,000 years ago.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Show 22 more
The oldest people in the Americas are in South America, because the first wave went furthest and got isolated there.
One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America, the ones that got separated early and didn’t mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Pyramids were being built on the coast of Peru thousands of years before anything in Egypt.
In fact, there’s one that’s now pushing 6000 BCE. That’s thousands of years before the stuff in Egypt. And that one’s called Huaca Prieta. And it was not an Egyptian pyramid, but it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Pyramids appear all over the world because that is the shape a big building takes without cement, not because of any shared source.
I think that when people wanted to build a big building without rebar or cement, you end up building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top, and that turns into a pyramid.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Religion in South America began in the Amazon, not on the coast.
I think religion in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old. Actually, the earliest pottery in all of the Americas, all these places that we have civilizations that grew up, you know where the oldest pottery is? The middle of the Amazon.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Andean religion was essentially monotheistic: one fanged creator deity stands behind cultures separated by thousands of years.
But he is the one creator deity, in my opinion, through all of these cultures. And the people in the Amazon still talk about him there. His name is Viho Masse in some groups, but they say that his emissaries on earth are the jaguars and that he is the creator deity.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Hallucinogens shaped religion in the Americas in a way they could not elsewhere, because almost every psychotropic plant is American.
In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Graham Hancock's research is good; his conclusion that one lost civilization seeded all the others is not.
I do not believe Graham’s idea that a single, now lost ancient civilization seeded the rest of them. I just don’t see that on a number of levels, artifact wise, technology wise, art, historical analysis.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
A civilization that advanced and that large would have left something behind, and archaeologists find fish scales.
And archeologists, all of our ideas are theories. Very few of them are facts, and we could have the story wrong, but one thing we’re real good at is finding stuff. We find fish scales, so I find it just too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large that we can’t even find a potsherd from.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Responsible scientists try to disprove their own theories, and archaeology keeps stepping out of that box.
And as responsible scientists, we’re trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories. That’s one more foot out of the science box that archeology often steps.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Every paradigm-shifting idea began as heresy, so outlandish ideas have to be kept on the table.
But I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans have ever had began as heresy and lunacy. That guy was crazy up to the second. He was brilliant. And so we got to keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish, because one of them eventually is going to lead us to the big paradigm shift.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Amazonian peoples look frozen in time because abundance removed the pressure that makes cultures change.
And one thing the Amazon is, once you figure out how not to die in it, it’s a paradise of food. Food’s fallen from the sky all the time there, and once you learn to adapt to that environment, you’ve got very little need. There’s no pressure to make anything else. Things are working.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Archaeology's culture names and periods draw lines where there were none, and the people themselves did not care about any of them.
Archeology, in this regard, is the worst enemy of this. So we put these names on cultures, we talk about how they evolve from one to another, we draw these lines where there aren’t any.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
The Maya built their sacred calendar out of the human gestation period: they looked into their bodies rather than up at the sky.
I mean, if that’s right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together, when they thought about, “We need a count of time for us,” they didn’t look up into the heavens, they looked into their bodies. “What’s the first cycle that we actually go through as humans?” and they picked this nine-month thing. It really is our cycle, and no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
The Maya calendar never said the world ends in 2012, and their own texts talk about time after it.
In fact, there’s a handful of dates that tell us that the fourth creation does continue farther on, that that baktun place should have 20 baktuns in it, like their counting system would dictate, not 13.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Maya hieroglyphs must have been readable across several spoken languages, the way Chinese characters or Latin were.
There must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin. You know how there was a period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin? Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
The Classic Maya cities emptied because people got sick of kings.
But then we have the interesting case of in the Postclassic, they shed the idea of kings. They don’t like kings anymore. That’s probably a big part of why the Classic disappearance and the abandonment of all those cities happened. People just got sick of kings.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
The Maya did not collapse; they moved a few kilometres out into perishable houses, and archaeology could not see it.
I think it’s a failing of archeology to properly see what was happening. I think that most of those cities populations moved no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm, and they lived in perishable houses.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
The Aztec empire could not have lasted, because it ruled by force; the Inca empire could have.
They were not ruling justly. They were ruling by force. And that can only go on so long before revolution happens. The Inca Empire, I think that would’ve gone on forever.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
The Inca stones were not fitted by patient pecking with hammer stones; they were fused with acid.
The common archeological wisdom that you’d find out of a textbook is that they just kept pecking away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be bullshit, that there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammerstone. I personally think it’s acids.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Spain and Portugal are unfairly maligned by the Black Legend: it was the diseases that killed the Americas.
I think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what’s been called the Black Legend, that they just marched into America and murdered everyone. That’s not the fact. It was the diseases that murdered everyone.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
Calling North America's earthworks mounds is a western bias; what those people built were pyramids.
but what they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now, and they didn’t build them out of stone. That’s kind of our just inherent western bias. Something that’s built out of stone is sophisticated, and something that’s built out of dirt is rudimentary.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
We are wasting our time trying to reverse the climate crisis instead of building the technology to survive it.
I think you have some guys that have their finger on the pulse there. We need to start thinking about how we’re going to survive this, not that we’re going to make it go away.
Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 Said 30 Sept 2024
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